Credit: TechReview

New macOS Features

For one, it introduces the more than 70 new emoji characters that were added to iOS 13.2 earlier this week. They include new animals, food, activities, accessibility and skin tone options.

The update also adds support for the AirPods Pro with noise cancelation, which were unveiled yesterday and officially launch tomorrow, Oct. 30.

There are also some notable privacy and security updates here, including new options for users to decide whether they want to share Siri recordings with Apple, as well as compatibility with HomeKit Secure Video.

Users will also be able to add AirPlay 2 speakers to scenes and automations in the macOS Catalina Home app.

macOS Bug Fixes

As you might expect, macOS Catalina 10.15.1 also contains a number of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. It addresses some of the following issues:

1. Improves migration reliability of iTunes libraries to Music, Podcasts and TV.
2. Addresses two issues in Photos that caused problems with file names in All Photos view and the ability to filter by certain criteria in the Days view.
3. Fixes a bug that only sent a single notification in Messages, when when repeat alerts were enabled.
4. Fixes a bug in TV that caused downloaded titles to not appear in Downloads.

This is technically the first time that Apple has revised macOS Catalina, but the first one was a supplemental update that addressed a number of significant bugs with the software.

macOS Catalina itself is a major update that killed iTunes and introduced new standalone Music, Podcasts and TV apps. It also added a number of security and privacy features, revamped a slew of native apps, and nixed support for 32-bit apps.

On the other hand, macOS Catalina is fairly buggy — so you may want to wait until a .2 release to download it if you haven’t already. If you’re currently running Catalina, then 10.15.1 is strongly recommended.

The new 10.15.1 update should now be available as an over-the-air download to all users with compatible Macs. You’ll be able to find and install it in the Mac App Store’s Update pane.